Shock-Horror: New Drinking Laws Have Had Virtually No Effect
The new drinking laws that allowed 24-hour alcohol sales have “not seen the huge rise in alcohol-related incidents that some feared, but there doesn’t appear to have been a move towards the hoped for café culture either.” (London Ambulance Service spokesman, The Guardian)
Well, duh. I could have told you exactly the same thing long before the law was introduced. Extending drinking times was never going to lead to a free for all on alcohol drinking. People aren’t that stupid. And neither was it ever going to give us the continental “cafe culture” drinking style either, especially not in just one year. To get that apparently much-desired drinking culture requires more than just legislation, like everything. It needs a social change from within the alcohol selling business and drinkers themselves.
As yet, very few pubs are open all that much later. 24 hour drinking is very much an urban myth. Almost all the pubs I know of close by midnight, and certainly by 1am, if not still by eleven. Even the student bars on my campus close at 11pm most of the week. Only on Fridays and Saturdays do the bars even close at midnight, and the clubs only open till 3am rather than 2am. Not such a huge change there.
What the extended drinking times have done is allow people to drink for a bit longer in pubs,
which staggers the number of people leaving pubs and entering clubs, thus meaning that fewer inebriated people are on the streets at the same time, so less fights occur.
The Licencing Act 2003 is the best piece of legislation this Labour government has passed. Restricting pubs to 11pm closures was a hangover from the Second World War. The sooner that there is less restrictions on the opening times of public houses, the better. After all, few landlords or punters really wants full 24-hour drinking - by 3 or 4am people want to go home to bed anyway. Let pubs and drinkers decide when they drink, not government.
Sources: The Guardian, BBC News: article 1, article 2, Politics.co.uk
This entry is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Government is always so afraid to give freedom and choice, we are adults and can make sensible choices!
What tickled me over Summer is that they are redeveloping one of my local towns. They’re going to turn what is presently the bus station into a “continental area”, complete with pavement cafés and similar - just like in Paris. How this then fits with the ban on street drinking I’m not sure, but not doubt they’ll figure that out after they’ve redeveloped
Slight problem with this style though - aforementioned town is an East Lancashire mill-town. About 50% chavs (and young single mothers), about 50% old men who like nothing better than a few pints of bitter in an evening. Continental drinking will never happen!